7th October 2008 Archive

A Japanese financial services outfit has agreed to purchase Lehman Brothers' India-based operational support businesses, rescuing roughly 3,000 people - including 1,200 IT professionals - from the worldwide economic meltdown.

Visa and Nokia have signed a deal to embed Visa functionality in the NFC-touting Nokia 6212 Classic, enabling US owners to upload their Visa accounts onto the handset as well as transferring money between handsets over the wireless network.

Motor racing chief Max Mosley has applied to the European Court of Human Rights in an attempt to reform the UK's privacy laws. He wants editors to be forced to tell people when they are about to publish stories about them.

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, aka IBEX, will on 19 October lift off from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands on a mission to probe the interstellar boundary beyond our heliosphere's termination shock1 - a region where "the hot solar wind slams into the cold expanse of space", as NASA nicely puts it.

Billions of pounds of public money will soon be up for grabs for private IT contractors ready to serve the Interception Modernisation Programme - UK spy chiefs' plan to store details of every call, email, text and web browsing session.

The skies are looking bleaker for those who like to enliven dull plane trips with a bit of internet porn - Delta Airlines has announced it intends to filter "inappropriate" websites on its planned airborne Wi-Fi service.

The US government is funding research into using LED lighting as data network access points. Room or street lamps would link with devices using visible light, carrying data beyond over existing power lines.

Sun is crowing that a judicial ruling in the NetApp_Sun IP lawsuit has effectively invalidated another NetApp patent. The US Patent Office also appears to be rejecting NetApp's key patents in the law suit. NetApp's position looks like it's crumbling.

The US defence department has announced the winner of its "Wearable Power Prize", a contest to develop a portable powerpack which could lessen the crippling load of batteries carried by modern soldiers. The $1m purse has been taken by US firm DuPont, partnered with Germany's SFC (Smart Fuel Cell).

Famous flying-car inventor Paul Moller, who was fined in 2003 by the US authorities for selling "fraudulent unregistered stock" on the internet, is now selling his personal flying saucer prototype on eBay. Our advice: buyer beware.

Say 'bonjour' to Renault's electric city car concept, the imaginately monikered ZE - for 'Zero Emission', if you have to ask - which it expects to put into full-scale production three years down the 'pike.

You don’t have to be a gamer to recognise her svelte curves and thigh-strapped weaponry. But the tomb raiding temptress, Lara Croft, is to make a comeback in two new chapters, exclusive to the Xbox 360.

If you have a camera, are ever so slightly worried about the burgeoning surveillance society in the UK, and are prepared to brave the hostility of police and passers-by, then you too could take part in "Freedom Not Fear Day" this weekend.

Dell is introducing a DL2000 disk-to-disk (D2D) backup appliance that comes with integrated Symantec or CommVault backup software and is meant as an alternative to tape backup, which is relegated to offsite backup.

AMD shares rose more than 18 per cent on Wall Street this morning, following confirmation from the struggling chip maker that it will spin off its manufacturing operations and build a wafer fab in conjunction with its money-spinning bedfellow, the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC).

Last month saw the launch of SpecEx, allowing companies to sell on spectrum licences - but SpecEx backers Spectrum Bridge want to see us all competing for a few MHz in the brave new world of secondary markets.

Surveillance programs that try to identify terrorists by trawling the internet and electronic databases for tell-tale signs are of limited success and should be carefully evaluated for privacy concerns, a group of technologists and policy makers that advises the US government said.